The Diversity Blog – SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategyhttp://diversity.net.nz
Thoughts on the Future of Business and User-Centered TechnologyWed, 07 Dec 2016 14:41:18 +0000en-UShourly12087063Daatrics answers the call from over-anxious new parentshttp://diversity.net.nz/daatrics-answers-the-call-from-over-anxious-new-parents/2016/12/07/
http://diversity.net.nz/daatrics-answers-the-call-from-over-anxious-new-parents/2016/12/07/#respondWed, 07 Dec 2016 14:00:00 +0000http://www.diversity.net.nz/daatrics-answers-the-call-from-over-anxious-new-parents/2016/12/07/ News today that Daatrics, a company that specializes in wearable devices, is reinventing the way baby monitors work. For its part, Daatrics, which was founded in 2014, is a London-based design house that has spent a couple of years, generously funded by its investors, playing around with different wearable opportunities.

Its first product, Neebo, is an infant-care system including an egg-shaped wearable, a mobile app and a charging station. The idea of the product is to give new parents an unheard of amount of data and statistics about their baby.

Now, I have to say that I’m a bit of a skeptic about baby monitors of either the analog or digital variety. When my children were young, my wife and I had a pragmatic approach toward their care. We would, of course, put them to sleep in a position as advised by medical specialists and we would, also of course, make sure there were no dangers around them that could cause them harm. Beyond that, however, we determined that they would generally let us know when they needed tending and that having a baby monitor would only heighten our anxiety and do little for them.

]]>http://diversity.net.nz/daatrics-answers-the-call-from-over-anxious-new-parents/2016/12/07/feed/034235Mirantis moves deeper into the container world, launches certificationhttp://diversity.net.nz/mirantis-moves-deeper-into-the-container-world-launches-certification/2016/12/06/
http://diversity.net.nz/mirantis-moves-deeper-into-the-container-world-launches-certification/2016/12/06/#respondTue, 06 Dec 2016 16:28:00 +0000http://diversity.net.nz/mirantis-moves-deeper-into-the-container-world-launches-certification/2016/12/06/Mirantis is well known as a pure play OpenStack vendor. The company is (was) entirely focused on offering organizations help leveraging the OpenStack open-source cloud computing platform.

As we’ve seen over recent years, the OpenStack initiative, while popular in some areas (science and telco, for example) hasn’t seen the sort of service provider revenues that justify the massive valuations of venture-backed companies.

So, while other vendors have gone to the wall and had to sell themselves off to the highest bidder, Mirantis seems to be making a determined effort to pivot into adjacent areas. No longer is this a pure-play OpenStack company; Mirantis now pitches itself as an organization that “helps top enterprises build and manage private cloud infrastructure using OpenStack and related open-source technologies.”

The company’s software automates the migration of applications to public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. But its aim to reduce the time, complexity, and hassle around this process is hampered somewhat by the fact that in the trio of functions that applications rely upon—storage, compute and networking—it is the last, networking, that dictates the availability or otherwise of an application. If the networks behind an application fail, the application essentially fails to exist.

]]>http://diversity.net.nz/cloudvelox-offers-automated-cloud-network-customizations/2016/12/06/feed/034227AWS re:Invent — Bigger, faster, better?http://diversity.net.nz/aws-reinvent-bigger-faster-better/2016/12/05/
http://diversity.net.nz/aws-reinvent-bigger-faster-better/2016/12/05/#respondMon, 05 Dec 2016 15:09:00 +0000http://diversity.net.nz/aws-reinvent-bigger-faster-better/2016/12/05/I’m writing this post on my way home from the Amazon Web Service (AWS) re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, having spent a day in an analyst-only preview of all the news from the show.

As I write this, the 30,000 or so attendees at the show are blissfully unaware of just how much is coming down the wire in terms of new AWS’s new innovations. It seems a little strange to have left the event before it has actually started for everyone else, but 12 hours spent at 30,000 feet is a great way to ruminate over what I’ve just heard.

]]>http://diversity.net.nz/aws-reinvent-bigger-faster-better/2016/12/05/feed/034223GoDaddy offers WordPress management as a customer attractanthttp://diversity.net.nz/godaddy-offers-wordpress-management-as-a-customer-attractant/2016/12/01/
http://diversity.net.nz/godaddy-offers-wordpress-management-as-a-customer-attractant/2016/12/01/#respondThu, 01 Dec 2016 19:43:00 +0000http://www.diversity.net.nz/godaddy-offers-wordpress-management-as-a-customer-attractant/2016/12/01/Exhibit One: GoDaddy, a company that used to be the (arguably) best-known web hosting company on earth, but is now moving to calling itself a cloud platform. While the semantics may be debatable, and some would argue about GoDaddy’s cloud title, the fact is that this positioning is a smart move given the ascendancy of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.

Exhibit Two: WordPress, the open source content management system that is used by gazillions of individuals and organizations to host their blogs (and other content). WordPress is easy, quick and, most importantly, free, and has gained mass adoption for all those reasons.

]]>http://diversity.net.nz/godaddy-offers-wordpress-management-as-a-customer-attractant/2016/12/01/feed/034219Splunk goes down-market and leverages AWS’ market dominancehttp://diversity.net.nz/splunk-goes-down-market-and-leverages-aws-market-dominance/2016/11/30/
http://diversity.net.nz/splunk-goes-down-market-and-leverages-aws-market-dominance/2016/11/30/#respondWed, 30 Nov 2016 13:00:00 +0000http://diversity.net.nz/splunk-goes-down-market-and-leverages-aws-market-dominance/2016/11/30/ Anyone who spends any reasonable amount of time perusing technology blogs will be well aware that this week sees Amazon Web Services holding its annual re:Invent event in Las Vegas. The event, which has become a “must attend” for most technology journalists and analysts (not to mention customers, partners and, often, competitors), sees tens of thousands of individuals descend upon Las Vegas to hear the latest and greatest from the cloud computing behemoth. It also sees a bunch of third-party vendors make product announcements — either to roll out something that leverages a newly announced AWS feature, or simply to ride in the jet stream of the No. 1 public cloud vendor.

]]>http://diversity.net.nz/splunk-goes-down-market-and-leverages-aws-market-dominance/2016/11/30/feed/034215SecureAuth introduces another take on multi-factor authenticationhttp://diversity.net.nz/secureauth-introduces-another-take-on-multi-factor-authentication/2016/11/30/
http://diversity.net.nz/secureauth-introduces-another-take-on-multi-factor-authentication/2016/11/30/#respondWed, 30 Nov 2016 13:00:00 +0000http://diversity.net.nz/secureauth-introduces-another-take-on-multi-factor-authentication/2016/11/30/SecureAuth is in the business of adaptive access control. What that means in plain (or at least more plain) English is that the company offers security solutions that balance strength with ease of use and that adapt to different use cases.

An example of adaptive access control might be requiring a simple username and password for regular access, but requiring a higher level of authentication when the user (for example) logs in from another geography.

As data breaches have gained massive prominence in recent years, due in part to some celebrities’ dual proclivities for poor password control and a penchant for naked selfies, the public has become increasingly aware of multi-factor authentication (MFA) a process that requires a subsequent authentication entry beyond simply username and password.

]]>http://diversity.net.nz/secureauth-introduces-another-take-on-multi-factor-authentication/2016/11/30/feed/034211SwiftStack ramps up its hybrid cloud offeringshttp://diversity.net.nz/swiftstack-ramps-up-its-hybrid-cloud-offerings/2016/11/28/
http://diversity.net.nz/swiftstack-ramps-up-its-hybrid-cloud-offerings/2016/11/28/#respondMon, 28 Nov 2016 17:14:00 +0000http://diversity.net.nz/swiftstack-ramps-up-its-hybrid-cloud-offerings/2016/11/28/This week sees Amazon Web Services (AWS) holding its annual re:Invent conference in sunny Las Vegas. Since AWS is the public cloud vendor that everyone agrees rules the roost, it is unsurprising to see a huge proliferation of pitches in my inbox all hanging off the AWS event.

Some of these pitches are completely irrelevant to re:Invent (“this new aftershave for men is designed for the public cloud”), while others are far more related to the fundamental change in the way that technology is done that AWS represents.

I’m the son of a doctor and one thing I inherited from him, if not my science acumen, was the horrendous nature of my handwriting. I really wish I had nice flowing script like my wife, but after a few words laziness gets to me and my writing ends up looking like chicken scratch. There is also the slightly annoying fact that I have never signed something the same way twice — my signature is not only an illegible scrawl, but also an ever changing one.

Then there is, of course, the hassle of printing out documents, signing them and then scanning them for on-sending — all a pain that offends my slightly obsessive-compulsive need for simplicity. So, yeah, I’m a fan of electronic signing and always suggest, when people present me with a document to sign, that they try and do it electronically.

The company was a pioneer in server virtualization and has grown to dominate the space. In the process, it became a supplier to virtually every large organization on earth. But the time, as they say, are a-changing, and VMware is under pressure.

The rise of cloud computing vendors such as Amazon Web Services, new approaches towards technology such as containerization and serverless computing, and a fundamentally different way of doing enterprise IT all mean that some clouds are on the horizon for VMware.

So, this is one company that wants to be tightly aligned with the wishes of its customers. Some, less sympathetic commentators would suggest that this is, in fact, a company that wants to spread fear and uncertainty within its customer base so that those customers will want to stick with their “trusted partner.” Either way, a survey recently commissioned by the company is interesting reading. Both in and of itself, but also given the unusual context VMware sits within.